Book Thread 2018^H9

I’ve really enjoyed the Galaxy’s Edge series (not to be confused with the magazine). It’s a re-telling of the Star Wars mythos from the perspective of the Storm Troopers. Changes the formula up in several places but the overarching themes are largely present.

Does a great job of presenting military action from the perspective of the soldiers fighting. This is hard core Military Sci-Fi, which seems appropriate for Memorial Day weekend. May not be for everyone though.


(Amazon leaves out Imperator, which is a companion / background novel on one of the characters - which shouldn’t be read until past book 5 to avoid spoilers)

Has anyone read the new Stephen King?

I am working through Twisted Prey by Sandford. He remains one of my favorite writers.

I am listening to the Book of Swords swords & sorcery anthology, and can recommend it. I have discovered several new authors I like.

I read the first few pages of the first book and was interested enough to buy. But holy crap, eight books and the first was published in January 2017? Are these guys machines, or just been sitting on this magnum opus series for a long time? Are they all pretty good?

Yes, I think they wrote several but waited to publish. They’re well written - better than average overall.

I really enjoyed the story. The second book jumps ahead in the timeline and seems disjointed at first. They bring the narrative together in the subsequent books. It comes together well and is a great read.

Finished it. It was a quick read.I thought it was a great concept, great setup for the first half of the first novel, then didn’t really explore the conceit at all. He mostly just used it as a way to rehash a bunch of Star Trek stories, but without Star Trek’s social awareness. (He literally has a vignette where, at a party, all the women are in the kitchen cooking and washing and remarks how nothing has changed in 200 years. Ugh.) There is one major character who is female in the series, and her purpose is to serve as a kind of Beatrice. (Taylor’s hamfistedness here makes me appreciate Lemony Snickett’s slyness all the more.) Bobs are always virtuous and capable and know the right thing to do: a pantheon of geek gods. Aside from the barely-cloaked sexism, he also has a luddite’s understanding of evolution, which veers dangerously close to eugenics. And he doesn’t get relativity, nor does he deal with the paradoxes that would be ever-present with bunch of Bobs communicating instantaneously across light-years while at various relativistic speeds. (Once you have FTL comms, causal chains become unglued.)

This should have been a good series of books. It starts out well. It should have explored the issues of consciousness and identity more in-depth. This is what the conceit is crying out for. Instead it’s just solipsistic to a ridiculous degree. I think the first book is worth reading, but skip the rest.

I’m now about halfway through Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon and, as a palate cleanser it’s great. A quote:

Poetry is a shotgun aimed at our shared experience hoping to hit enough of the target that we all infer a great bulk of information conveyed as implication and metaphor in an approximately similar way.

Gnomon is about consciousness and identity and how narratives are constructed. It is, like most of Harkaway’s writing, kind of elliptical, tinged with shades of magical realism. It’s about… hmmm, well at heart about a woman who dies while under interrogation and the subsequent investigation into her death. But this all takes place in a kind of Benthamian high-tech future society where surveillance is both total and mostly welcome. The “interrogation” is literal mind-reading, but who the subject is and how she attempted to defeat the interrogators and how it did or didn’t cause her death are the core of the narrative. It’s a fascinating, multi-layered novel. It evokes David Mitchell and Claire North, but with Harkaway’s gift for prose.

Agree 100% with your take on the Bobiverse books, although I was a little more tolerant of its shortcomings. (Probably more tolerant than I should have been.)

Finishing up the Rifter trilogy right now (thanks for the heads-up on that one). I enjoyed the first 2/3 of the first book, and then it seemed to lose some of the thread I was enjoying the most. Well-written, great sci-fi in a lot of ways but the story and character development stuff is falling a little short for me, and the plot can be a little confusing.

I enjoyed Harkaway’s Gone-Away World, will give Gnomon a shot.

Finished the ninth and final Iron Druid book by Kevin Hearne. It was okay. I still enjoyed the characters and the setting he’d created, but I feel like in the most recent books he kind of lost his focus. If I had to point my finger at something, I think I’d probably cite his decision to move away from Atticus as the viewpoint character to a two and then three way split between him, Granuaile, and his former mentor Owen. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Granuaile and Owen, and they have some important roles to play in the late books’ narrative, but it ends up making the books feel like a series of loosely connected short stories instead of dramatic and propulsive action. Not even the advent of Ragnarok reverses this trend.

Just finished Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I had read a few volumes of this author’s arthropod-flavored fantasy series (yes, this is a thing) Shadows of the Apt series and enjoyed them but ultimately felt they sprawled and meandered a bit.

Children of Time is much more focused and is science fiction rather than fantasy, still with an arthropod element, but full of Big Ideas. A high technology human society starts a terraforming and accelerated evolution experiment on a planet, and then things go wrong… and weird. Very weird. There’s a sense of scale here that is an element of epic sci-fi that the author does well. A good read.

Also, ant computing.

Thanks for this, I enjoyed the first book of the Apt series but felt it was ultimately the same old fantasy story with an admittedly cool setting. Children of Time sounds much neater.

Children of Time is really good. After you finish that, try Sue Burke’s Semiosis, which also has an alien intelligence in it and spans generations of colonists.

Dawkins himself has said The Extended Phenotype is the best thing he has written, although I haven’t read it.

I have Selfish Gene but never got through it cover-to-cover. It’s a pretty difficult read, IMO, compared to Blind Watchmaker or Climbing Mt. Improbable. Not that that’s a bad thing. Just requires more rigorous focus page-by-page.

Zero Hour, the latest (in audio format anyway) in the Expeditionary Force series by Craig Alanson.

You know, I really like this series. I think that Alanson has a knack for writing mil sci-fi, and action in general. I like that his characters tend to do smart stuff and get into trouble anyway. I like that every action that the protagonists take to get themselves out of a jam has unintended consequences that come back to bite them later on.

But at the same time, I think it’s about time to wrap this thing up. The core story conceit of an ultra-intelligent AI who can’t innovate needs the help of an ignorant grunt soldier who doesn’t know anything is wearing a bit thin and is in danger of starting to become a rote cliche.

I’m also fairly sure I know where the overarching mystery at the heart of the story is going, and I’m just getting impatient for the author to get to the end so I can see if I’m right or not.

Review wise - If you’ve enjoyed the series to date, you’ll like this one too.

I breezed through The Singularity Trap by Dennis E. Taylor, the author of My Name is Legion, My Name is Bob.

It’s fine. Nowhere near as cool and innovative as “Legion” but it’s also a fairly different story type. When I read the dust-jacket summary I was afraid it was going to be another geek-wish-fulfillment tale, but it turns out it’s more of a “heist” story with a twist.

Taylor’s’s characters are still pretty flat and there are all sorts of logical issues with his core concept, but the writing is easily accessible and the pacing is really good. The book is really quite short (the audiobook is only eleven hours, which is about half what a normal novel runs, and like “Legion” I think that Taylor briefly touches on a slew of interesting sci-fi questions… that he then leaves lying on the floor untouched.

The audiobook is well done with some well-placed voice “special effects” that move the story along nicely.

The following article on Eurogamer has made this very intriguing book shoot to the top of my to read list:

Has anyone else read it?

I read this a while back, but realized recently that I’d saved the review as a draft and never hit publish. Whoops.

Interesting fantasy world, but it’s pretty slow going early on. Good once you get to the end, but it’s a slog making it that far.

I blew through my Audible subscription this month, so I grabbed an audiobook that was on sale last week: Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which I had somehow never gotten around to reading even though it inspired one of my favorite Stephen King short stories, The Jaunt.

Really good. You can see the 1957 publication date showing through the fiction in a number of places, but it’s amazing how many cyberpunk tropes Bester had in this book, pre-dating the sub-genre by decades: Megacorporations, cybernetic enhancement, and to a lesser extent the super-science McGuffin.

If you haven’t read it, it’s essentially a sci-fi adaption of the Count of Monte Christo and features a darkly interesting anti-hero who for most of the book is almost entirely unsympathetic.

Alfred Bester was a hell of a writer and it makes me sad he only wrote a few novels.

Agreed.